Front of house, back of house, other island: who is actually working in your team

Ask a hotel manager in Seychelles who works hardest in the team and the answer comes quickly. It is usually someone the manager sees often: at reception, on the restaurant floor, in the office next door. Ask who would be missed most if they left tomorrow, and the answer is often someone else.

The gap between these two answers is where many management mistakes begin. Four cases come up again and again.

1. The one you always see

The restaurant supervisor who is everywhere during service, greets every table and is the last to leave. The manager sees them constantly and naturally reads this as commitment.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the supervisor is compensating for a service that is badly organised, doing the tasks of three people because nobody has fixed the rota, and producing tired staff and slow tables despite their energy. Visible effort and good results are not the same measure.

What helps: looking at the results of the service rather than the supervisor’s energy. Waiting times, complaints, staff turnover on the team. If these are good, the praise is deserved. If not, the conversation is about organisation, not about effort.

2. The one nobody sees

The storekeeper who makes sure the kitchen never runs out, the maintenance technician who fixes the air conditioning before guests notice, the night auditor who closes the day’s accounts. Their work is invisible by design: when it is done well, nothing happens.

These colleagues are regularly underestimated, and they rarely complain. They are noticed the week they are on leave, when the problems start. By then, few people connect the problems to their absence.

What helps: the manager making the work visible, not the person. Asking someone to promote their own work puts them in an uncomfortable position. Naming it yourself, once, precisely, in front of the team, changes how everyone sees it: “The kitchen has not run short once this season, and that is because of Joseph’s ordering.”

3. The one on another island

A company with its head office in Victoria and teams on Praslin or La Digue, or a hotel group with properties on several islands, faces a specific distortion. Colleagues close to management are seen at work; colleagues on another island are seen only in reports and video calls.

The result is a distance bias, sometimes called proximity bias: presence near the decision-makers reads as contribution, and absence reads as absence. The supervisor on Praslin who runs a good team without calling head office every day may be the best manager in the group, and the least well known.

What helps: judging all sites on the same written results, forwarding positive guest and client feedback to the whole company, and visiting in person at regular intervals rather than only when something goes wrong.

4. The one who is always there

Arrives early, leaves late, answers messages at night. They sincerely believe this shows commitment, and are hurt when it is not recognised as such.

The difficulty is the standard it sets. In Seychelles, many employees have constraints on their hours: a bus from the south of Mahé, children to collect, a ferry to catch, sometimes a second job. A team that treats long hours as proof of seriousness penalises all of them, and produces lasting resentment.

What helps: stating clearly what is measured, and behaving accordingly. If results are what counts, say so, and stop commenting approvingly on late departures.

Three questions before judging anyone

What was agreed? If the expected results were never written down, there is no performance question yet, only an expectation that was never shared. Start there.

What arrived, and when? Compared with what was agreed, not with an impression. This question separates the four cases: the invisible worker has delivered, the busy supervisor has delivered at a high cost, the colleague on another island has delivered without being seen, the one who is always there has delivered a normal amount over abnormal hours.

Who knows about it? If the results are real and the team does not know, the gap is the manager’s to close. It is not a performance problem at all.

The common mistake is to skip all three and move straight to a conversation about attitude. That conversation cannot be won, leaves the person with nothing concrete to change, and easily turns a perception problem into a conflict, with the dynamics described in four roles that keep a team conflict alive.

Defining results rather than watching effort is at the core of The manager-leader toolkit.